10 August, 2011

Fwd: solutions

From my friend Vicky.

Sent from my iPod

this is a cool letter from my friend Myles.

Our ancestors made it through the age of the dinosaur - I think we can make it thorough this.

We are not out of bullets - what we are lacking is a historical perspective. When the world reacted with fear and pulling back in 1929 it exacerbated the problems and exacerbated, if not led to, a massive world wide depression. Many of the wise heads have been saying, and I have been agreeing, that the turn around will happen if the government steps in and starts stimulating the economy with public works/repairs. It is not sexy and it increases our debt but our debt can not be paid off if we are not paying taxes and unemployed people do not pay taxes.

Look at California where a minor increase in jobs has caused our debt to go way down. What we have needed - all along and long before this crisis - is jobs. That is a major reason why the Arab world is rebelling - jobs - they want jobs. There is plenty to do. Even I could come up with enough ideas ideas to keep millions employed. If we put our heads together we could turn this mess into a bright future.

But we continue to recoil in fear and as we cower the walls fall around us - when we should be bracing the walls we are just staring in shock as they fall. The so called conservatives among us need to be sidelined before they can get us all the way back to the middle ages where a tiny percent owned everything and nearly everyone else lived short hard lives in perpetual poverty.

I am looking at the bright side also - there seems to be a faint noise in the land of people realizing that we do not need this monster military. In my opinion we could turn a large portion of that enterprise towards fixing our infrastructure - at least then we the people would have something when the dust cleared - instead of mountains of spent shell casings we could have fixed bridges and built new schools. And the builders would actually learn something useful - as opposed to the latest method of killing each other they could learn how to work with concrete (I know... I know...)

As the some of the wise founders saw it, and I agree, we can fight when we need to fight. We don't need to be constantly fully prepared for every war like contingency. When the Canadians attack just give me 6 weeks of training and I will be able to pull whatever trigger they tell me to pull. After all - our species has excelled at fighting for countless millennia.